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Recently, someone pointed me towards a survey given to gators that suggests they are left leaning politically. Since I'm teaching a graduate level methods course that includes survey creation this semester I was really curious to take a look. The creator not only put up their analysis but even included the entire survey and results, which are just a fantastic example of now
not
to create a survey. So I thought it might be fun to dissect it a little bit and talk about why it is a poorly done survey!

First, take a look at the article I was directed to
here
which links to the survey creator's blog here. Now we'll get to the analysis of the survey as problematic in a bit but that isn't necessarily the fault of the survey creator.

Question #1 Political Identification

To get at how GGs self identify the survey creator simply asked them to select from various categories. The exact wording of the question is, "Describe your political identity" and the options and responses were:

Liberal (or left-leaning) 438 (28.4%)

Conservative (or right-leaning) 63 (4.1%)

Left-libertarian 365 (23.7%)

Right-libertarian 159 (10.3%)

Left-authoritarian 9 (0.6%)

Right-authoritarian 21 (1.4%)

Centrist 93 (6%)

Centrist Libertarian 206 (13.4%)

Centrist Authoritarian 8 (0.5%)

Classical Liberal 51 (3.3%)

Other 127 (8.2%)

Obviously, asking people how they self identify can be very illuminating depending on the purpose of the survey. It doesn't tell you how people necessarily
actually
vote, view things, or behave so much as how they want you to think about them. This is where some of the analysis of this survey is highly problematic because this question's answers were pulled to prove GGs are leftist. It doesn't prove that one way or another. It proves that GGs view themselves as leftist, which is a subtle but very important difference.

OK but what about the categories given? This is not how most Americans categorize and think about their own viewpoints. But we do see categories like this in certain survey analysis. That's because there is a large set of political identification survey questions that are fairly standard and help us get a sense of people's political attitudes that are then categorized up like this. It helps us understand what types of people are really voting Republican and the like. But it isn't how individuals tend to self identify. It is how we as scholars apply categorization labels to people who answer questions about a wide variety of questions such as the PEW survey you can view
here. In other words, it is a bad set of options because most of us don't self label this way.

In other words, this entire question was bad.

Question #2 & 3 - questioning political identification

These questions ask "Has GamerGate made you question your previous political identification?" and if yes, "describe this further." Like many surveys the description is not open ended but rather a selection of options, which at least are more relatable and usable than what we saw above. Of the 38.4% who said yes they responded:

So most who began to question their identity considered themselves leftist. This is a better constructed question though again we should be careful to note we're talking about self identification and not actual attitudes & behaviors.

Impact on self perceived identification

The next few questions ask if GG has made someone identify more or less as a certain category. That is OK though we're starting to get into some serious priming issues which continue throughout. If I were guiding someone making this survey I'd suggest interspersing questions like this with less emotionally heightened ones and ensure that it isn't too obvious what your hypothesis is.

If you're curious, the questions were "Has gamergate made you more libertarian?" (40.9% said yes), "Are you now more likely to see the left as authoritarian?" (67.1% said yes), "Are you now more likely to consider voting for right-leaning parties or candidates?" (26% said yes).

They used a three point likert scale, which is an interesting choice as most literature suggests this is a poor way to evaluate frequency and sentiment. There are tons of debates about the value of an odd vs even likert scale and whether a 5, 7, or 10 point one is best. But in the vast majority of cases a three point likert is a poor study design. I think that holds in this case. I am also curious why they didn't ask about the full political spectrum. Without that, these responses are somewhat hard to contextualize and biased.

And then there is the very interesting, ""As a result of GamerGate, I am now more likely to trust conservatives than feminists." Do you agree or disagree with this statement?" to which we find:

Agree 388 (25.2%)

Disagree 549 (35.6%)

I already trusted conservatives/right-wingers more than feminists 284 (18.4%)

Other 220 (14.3%)

That Other category looks pretty big and I'd want to investigate that more. But it is an interesting question. However, questions like this really need to be asked a couple of times in slightly different ways because they are complex, emotional, and difficult to interpret. I'd also want to see variations on this theme with different subjects - more likely to trust liberals, less likely to trust conservatives, less likely to trust liberals, etc. You can't just throw out a question like this on its own with no other related questions. Bad survey design.

Opinion of Media Sources

Then begins 7 questions about how people feel about media sources (ex: "Has your opinion of left-leaning media sources declined, improved, or stayed the same?" to which 82.7% said declined). Again they are using a 3 point scale which is hard to defend and curious. But at least they try to cover a range of media sources so the results are a little less skewed.

Actual Political Values Questions

Then begins the questions that actually get at how people think and their attitudes rather than how they identify. Questions like, "The free market could fix most social problems if it was left alone by Government" and "Men, women, and minorities should be held to the same standards." They aren't the standard questions, for some reason, but they are interesting and you could make some neat claims with them (edit: though important to note that the questions are awfully worded and data probably entirely unreliable. It doesn't at all support claims of liberalism but I wouldn't rely on this for any solid academic claims.) Now it is a mistake to just lump responses to this in one category. The author failed to do any meaningful crosstabs and data analysis that would reveal actual political attitudes with the categories they get people to self identify as above. Why? I have no idea. If I had the time I'd go through in SPSS and do it myself but alas I don't have the time for that. Perhaps someone else can?
Here is the result data

Either way, we can see that responses are not actually that leftist in their attitudes. Here are some of the more interesting questions and responses (also we finally decided to use the 5 point scales for some reason??):

Although it is not an excuse for unequal standards, innate differences between the genders exist and should be discussed.

Strongly Disagree: 1.4%

Disagree 2.7%

Neutral 11.4%

Agree 31.9%

Strongly Agree 52.6%

"Positive" discrimination is no better than any other form of discrimination and should be opposed

Strongly Disagree 2%

Disagree 5%

Neutral 14.4%

Agree 24.8%

Strongly Agree 53.8%

There is an epidemic of sexual assault on American campuses.

Strongly Disagree 35.8%

Disagree 30.6%

Neutral 27.1%

Agree 5.1%

Strongly Agree 1.4%

Political movements designed to advance the interests of particular genders, races, or sexual identities are inherently divisive and discriminatory

Strongly Disagree 4.9%

Disagree 10.4%

Neutral 17%

Agree 29.7%

Strongly Agree 38%

If there is a feminist movement, there should also be a men's rights movement.

Strongly Disagree 3.9%

Disagree 6.5%

Neutral 21.1%

Agree 27.5%

Strongly Agree 41%

"Safe spaces" and "Trigger warnings" are just convenient masks for policing speech, art, and opinions.

Strongly Disagree 1.8%

Disagree 4.7%

Neutral 6.8%

Agree 26.3%

Strongly Agree 60.5%

Words like racism, misogyny and homophobia are losing their meaning through increasing misuse

Strongly Disagree 1.5%

Disagree 2%

Neutral 3.6%

Agree 21.1%

Strongly Agree 71.8%

My Discussion & Conclusion

If you want to see all of the questions go
here. Clearly, most respondents are actually quite reactionary and right wing in their responses to these questions.

Now, I can hear this a mile away so
what about acceptance of gay marriage and abortion?
That is a pretty clear answer - it may not be liberal so much as libertarian in the sense that they do not believe government should regulate what people do with their bodies. This falls in line much better with the rest of the data than saying they are liberals, though again some crosstabs would be nice if I had the time. However, it is also not a good measure of liberalness anymore.

As I'm sure will also be pointed out, we also see respondents also agree with scientific evidence for global warming. But this, just like the abortion & gay marriage points, do not necessarily point towards liberal attitudes.
PEW shows that 61% of young republicans favor gay marriage AND many also believe in climate change. Any analysis of this or any other survey that suggests gay marriage and climate change are good markers for being liberal or conservative have missed the boat on all the data for young conservatives (which is exactly the age demographic of most redditors.)

In other words, this survey clearly shows that most people responding see themselves as left leaning and yet their attitudes reveal very right wing reactionary when it comes to most topics. The few they are not still fall within the norm for young republicans and young conservatives in general. There is no evidence for GG being a leftist group. The article linked in the beginning is just chock full of bad discussion of the survey but I'll leave that for someone else to go through.

Edit: One last thought: To GG's credit this survey has a lot of priming issues. I can practically see respondents getting more and more worked up as they move through it until being quite angry once they get to some of the more emotional questions (like about Men's Rights movements and differences between the sexes). This is the way someone with an axe to grind against GG would construct a survey because you get more polarizing and angry responses. Yet, from what I understand the author of the survey is pro-GG. So I can only conclude they don't know how to construct a good survey. It is possible that a better survey would yield more moderate responses.

Edit#2: I guess most aren't reading the full thing so let me spell it out. This is bad social science in two ways. First, this is a bad survey and bad surveys create bad data. Second, the survey creator and various blogs take that data on face value and interpret it in ways that contradict that data. Just bad social science all around, which is why it belongs here. We don't know actual attitudes and values of GGs from this survey but there is nothing to indicate they are as
the author claims.

The most telling part about this is how they began to question their liberalism, but rather than own up to their social conservatism, they double down and screech that they're the real liberals. While being dismissive of issues of rape, thinking terms that describe bigots have no meaning, and rejecting "identity politics" which is convenient when most of your userbase isn't under attack for their sexual orientation, race, or gender. Also citing breitbart and AEI (conservative think tanks) and supporting the MRM, very much a reactionary movement.

What exactly makes them socially liberal? "We're cool with the gays except the LGBT movement and LGBT activism and some of us support abortion"?

As an atheist pot-smoker, I take offense to this! Ten years ago, I was a mostly straight-edge hard-christian. I loved guns, was convinced women were lesser and even still had issue towards mixed race marriages (I know...)

A lot has changed since then and I started writing this thinking I'd go somewhere funny with it but now I can't stop thinking about the deep irony that the movement itself is an example of the same bigotry they claim doesn't exist yet should still be defended.

It's the cultural polarization of modern American society. They are not religious reactionaries so in their minds they must be "socially liberal". They identify on a cultural level as "Blue Culture" even though they are politically and socially conservative.

Among hardcore gaming circles from my experience there's a bit of a stigma against those who self identify as conservative (why? Not sure, might have to do with age age correlations with political stances and stuff like how the NRA and people like Jack Thompson talk about games). Some of the people in GG might think negatively of those who identify as conservatives as well. Meanwhile, those who think negatively of GG that GGers clash with are decidedly left-leaning. They correctly interpret that anti-GGers are much farther to the left than they are, but interpret anti-GGers to be extreme leftists, so they must be moderately left (or vice versa I suppose).

So in that sense it could be a justification thing: "We aren't like those old conservatives, we just don't want to cater to leftist extremists!" By (intentionally or unintentionally) feigning being liberal, they avoid the conservative stigma and can claim they're not just doing the typical liberals vs conservatives rabble, but are actually more rational liberals who are trying to get rid of extremists doing harm. Hence views like "Occupy Wallstreet had the right idea, but it got ruined as SJWs".

They correctly interpret that anti-GGers are much farther to the left than they are, but interpret anti-GGers to be extreme leftists, so they must be moderately left (or vice versa I suppose).

I think this is a reasonable explanation of those whose
only
interest and awareness in politics comes from the intersection of politics and gaming (probably mostly teenage boys - and women, who tend to be less interested in politics in general). For those GamerGaters who are actually at least minimally political beyond that, it may not be the whole story, it sounds a bit like the tail wagging the dog in terms of political outlook on life. Give them some credit, they are not all mindless sheep and do know what e.g. global warming is (see survey results).

Hence views like "Occupy Wallstreet had the right idea, but it got ruined as SJWs".

This is Justine Tunney's hobby horse (she was the co-organiser of Occupy and arguably an SJW herself at the time!), I haven't seen anyone else pushing this.

It is indeed a common viewpoint there, but like a lot of viewpoints on the internet, it's barely researched and stems from their very specific view of politics. If you don't have their view of "the authoritarian left" and how "SJWs are ruining everything" then their logic'd reasoning about how "SJW"s ruined OWS doesn't make any sense, because it's just word logic that downplays or ignores certain aspects of what happened.

Ironically, the "no-research, hear a summary and suddenly know everything" mentality that KiA has about OWS is a big part about why OWS was such a disorganized clusterfuck.

The same reason reddit does. They're have supposedly liberal attitudes until those attitudes inconvenience them. Like they allegedly believe in equality of genders and races until they perceive someone getting a position or other benefit that they believe was undeserved.

They see themselves as hyper logical and scientific which, of course, is the opposite of conservatives/right leaners who are all delusional theists. And thanks to horseshoe theory the "extremist SJWs" are closer to religious fundamentalists than they are to "real" liberals.

You mean when people object to advantaging people on the basis of their race or gender? That's actually called anti-racism and anti-sexism. It means that you care about merit, and that race and gender are completely irrelevant to you. Unfortunately, this is not the case for SJWs.

From a SJW-analysis of Gamergate: "We found that pro-GG redditors are discriminatory towards minorities, as reflected by their adherence towards meritocracy and free market ideologies."

Meritocracy is discriminatory towards minorities, because minorities obviously have no merit. But that's totally not racist.

It comes as no surprise that this esteemed visitor from GamerGhazi would say that. Since no dissenting views are permitted on that subreddit, you don't really know how to... refute them. That's a real shame. You'd look a lot better if you did possess that ability.

All I see is someone using a pejorative as a thought terminating cliche. Therefore you will be ignored. Also funny that you accuse me of being a visitor even though your history indicates that you came here from KiA

Meritocracy is discriminatory towards minorities, because minorities obviously have no merit.

That's not the argument being made, and that's a highly offensive way of putting your strawman in any case.

The argument being made is that "tech is a meritocracy" is a lazy, non-empirical, basically argument from assertion. In reality, women and minorities face numerous discriminatory barriers and "the soft bigotry of low expectations" from childhood right through to interviews and performance reviews, which make claims of generalised industry meritocracy absurd.

I think that's a really complicated but fascinating question to try and answer. I'd really like to see a solid survey because it is important to better understand the changing political landscapes. Left and right may be too simplistic in some ways for fully understanding complex political perspectives. And clearly the huge generational gap for the GOP highlights there are underlying shifts going on that the media sucks at discussing well.

But I think right wing at least in America is often deeply linked with religion in the popular imagination. Though there are clearly non religious ways of being on the right, there is an attitude that atheists or at least anyone who is anti-established religion must be left leaning. I think that the religion aspect has overshadowed many aspects that are shared. But I'd need a quality survey to really prove any of that.

But I think right wing at least in America is often deeply linked with religion in the popular imagination. Though there are clearly non religious ways of being on the right, there is an attitude that atheists or at least anyone who is anti-established religion must be left leaning. I think that the religion aspect has overshadowed many aspects that are shared. But I'd need a quality survey to really prove any of that.

I think there's something to that because I used to be one of those people. -_-

I really doubt they've thought any of this through. There's just the vague idea that right-wing = conservative = religious, uptight, prudish as opposed to left-wing = liberal = secular, boundary-pushing, laid back. And as gamers, you know, they're comfortable with ultraviolence, oversexualization, and 420 blaze it bro culture, so clearly that makes them liberal. As far as I can tell that's the extent of their thought process. Also the left-right political spectrum is dumb as shit anyway.

If you are liberal yourself, this kind of dismissive rhetoric is a great way to turn off potential liberal voters. Do you not want liberal GamerGaters to vote for liberal politicians? (Let me guess, the answer is a cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face "No".) Even though the politicians they vote for may well be pro-choice etc.?

I think this is political OCPD - holding up people to unrealistically high standards. Let's get real here, the majority of voters are quite ignorant, and only scrape together barely enough knowledge to vote for who actually represents their views (and some don't even manage to do that - let alone to vote for who actually best represents their
interests). GamerGaters probably know more about politics, at least in their own area of obsession, than the average voter.

GGers are already swearing off Clinton in the USA because of something she said about video games
ten years ago. If they're going to vote against the left wing, this thread isn't what's going to convince them - they're already looking for reasons to vote for someone else.

As someone who was pro-Gamergate for a good month or more, I can explain easily why.

They don't. Every single one of them identifies as Libertarian or Fascist behind closed doors, on the IRC channel, on the 4chan and 8chan threads, they all constantly posted stuff like "leftism is a infantile disorder", they are far-right wing and they KNOW they are far-right wing.

The reason they claim they are left-wing is to deflect accusations that they are a far-right wing political front group, which is what they are.

Hell, as of like a week or so ago, I had some of them argue that Briebart was really "left wing". Yeah no, nobody is that dense.

I'm not sure how many of them are actually one thing or another, aside from hostile to "SJWs" and suspicious of academics. But I will say that the first thing that occurred to me in reading the survey was how malleable terms such as "left-libertarian" are. The write-ups conclude that these left-libertarians are all leftists, when it's entirely possible that these respondents' core political identity (for lack of a better term) emphasizes "libertarian" over "left." Even using this flawed survey, we could easily report instead that the vast majority of GG respondents are libertarian, rather than left or right leaning. I obviously can't say for sure whether this "emphasizing libertarian over left/right leanings" thing is true, but I think it would better explain the responses that describe GG opposition as "authoritarian," etc.

It's further evidence that this survey is kind of crap, but it's interesting to think about. If I get time this weekend, I might actually fiddle with charts just to demonstrate how silly and malleable these survey data really are.

I post things like that all the time, especially on 'rule34' and I'm still considered a deranged pinko lefty communist by my American fellows. (because I want to double the minimum wage, bring back paid maternity leave/vacations and give truly free medical care). So labels are pretty much meaningless for determining political stances.

No this is a good point - the person above is hyperbolically claiming that everyone involved was right/fascist and happy disclose it behind closed doors, but also wasn't right/fascist themselves. So how do we know there weren't others like him. And maybe they still are involved if they haven't been behind the same doors to see the ugly side.

Frankly "I saw a lot of fascist/right-entryist people before I quit" is a hell of a lotmore convincing than "that's what we ALL were, the LOT of us, except me I mean"

I suspect it is from the cultural and political polarization of American society. They align themselves on a cultural level as being in "Blue America", which has become synonymous with "Left-Wing" in the US, even though there are plenty of culturally "Blue" people who are fairly conservative, just not crazy Fundamentalist Christian Theocrat "Red" conservative.

It would probably help arguments on all sides to remember to add (or not) "traditional" before a label. Traditional (pre1900s) conservatives being the nutty eco-geek wing of politics for example, close to nature, species conservation, etc, before "If we break the planet god will just give us a new one" became the prevailing ideal.

So rather than just leave it at "conservative" or "liberal" or "libertarian" also recognising what time period they hail from. Young Republicans are essentially the conservatism of 1914 coming back for 2014, minus (sometimes) the nationalistic view of "our nation's soil" as espoused by Haeckle and Arndt

The Political Compass Test, FYI, is really flawed. It's been noted
here
and here
with direct responses to the link you posted, and you can get a quick, more general coverage of some of the problems with it on Wikipedia
or RationalWiki.

The point being, the results from the Political Compass Test are often skewed in favor of the political leanings the test designers had, as far as we can tell, and their lack of transparency in the design and methodology
should
make people skeptical.

Autowikibot post. Hover to view

The Politicalcompass.org website does not reveal the people behind it, beyond the fact that it seems to be based in the
UK. According to the
New York Times, the site is the work of Wayne Brittenden, a political
journalist. According to
Tom Utley, writing in the
Daily Telegraph, the site is connected to
One World Action, a charity founded by
Glenys Kinnock, and to Kinnock herself. An early version of the site was published on One World Action's web server.

The website does not explain its scoring system in detail and some writers have criticised its validity while others have treated it more as a form of entertainment than a rigorous analysis.

"Left-wing/liberal/progressive bias in technology and videogames journalism is a problem." with 71.5% agree.

This isn't "right-wing", even when you are left, you can answer that there is bias and it hurts the industry. This question indicates nothing. In my opinion it is always dangerous to go to extreme/radical in any direction. Left or right? That doesn't really matter.

"Political movements designed to advance the interests of particular genders, races, or sexual identities are inherently divisive and discriminatory", with only 10.4% answering in the negative.

Why is this "right"? I think this was answered very left. For me 10,4 is good. Because if you only "fight" for one specific race or gender than that is not "left" or diverse at all.

A political movement, which only fight for the rights of white humans

A political movement, which only fight for the rights of black humans

A political movement, which only fight for the rights of women

A political movement, which only fight for the rights of men

A political movement, which only fight for the rights of trans

For me all these will discriminate against each other at one point. And they try to win supporters by shitting on everyone else, who have not the same worldview.

Why not?:

A political movement, which fight for the rights of
humans?

I don't have to say specific race/gender should be treated like z. It would be better: humans should be treated like z. Why should i say: women should be paid like men? And not: all humans should be paid the same (depending on the job and so on)?

I don't know how you define the left as fascist, urge for the dissolution of movements and organizations to help the disenfranchised, and accuse the left of being a toxic influence in tech and video games while claiming those are all inherently left-wing position.

-> if you don't think "like a lefty" (whatever that is), you deserve to lose your job, life, anything

-> if you don't fall in line or have a different opinion: you are
white
and when you are white
your opinion is worth nothing, this is what the left/progressive media is preaching in the US and if that is not racist what is?

-> they want segregation(safe spaces) instead of inclusion. Yeah, let's put all white humans one room, all PoC in another. Again, for me there is nothing "left" about it.

... while claiming those are all inherently left-wing position.

Btw. i never claimed that, you wrote i claimed that. What i find funny, many of anti-GG claim to be "left" and they preach a extrem "right" agenda.

The things you mention aren't specific to the left or fascism though; I can easily find instances of GamerGate spreading lies to achieve their goals, demanding people who've offended GG be fired, treating the opinion of "SJWs", social scientists, philosophers, and non-STEM/people who agree with GG as worthless/biased, and many GGers characterize GG as a fight to preserve gaming as a safe space for them. These aren't tactics that are limited to any particular political ideology.

Btw. i never claimed that, you wrote i claimed that

Then how are the conclusions you're reaching not simply right-wing? It's your contention that the questions as answered are indicative of a left-wing or at least not-right-wing stance.

I just don't label them, why should i? Why should i care if you consider a opinion left- or right-wing? When i say opinion x = left and you say opinion x = right-wing. That doesn't make it right or wrong. We only like to label it, because it is easy to say: opinion/statement x = left- or right-wing, so it is wrong or not wrong only because it is left- or right-wing, which is a pretty dumb argument.

For me it is more about freedom vs. authority. Anti-GG want to dictate what is aloud and what isn't. They want to dictate what a dev can make. They want to dictate what gamers have to like. They want to dictate what is "good" and what is "evil".

My opinions are my opinions, i don't really care how a random persons on the internet labels them, so they feel good about it. Label my opinions as right-wing, if it helps you to sleep at night.

I can easily find instances of GamerGate spreading lies to achieve their goals,...

Which goals were archived by lies from GG? Btw. the same goes for anti-GG, many people lost their jobs thanks to idiotic anti-GG twitter idiots. Anti-GG supports a blacklist, anti-GG tries to get women out of the games-industry (Seedscape, Huniepop, TFYC). So surprise surprise there are idiots on both sides. We don't even have the media on "our side" or at least neutral coverage, so how can GG lie to archive anything? if no one believe them anyways?

But why is my opinion less valuable, because there are idiots and trolls and yours is better even if the same happens everywhere?

I love this post. Just one more thing to add, though I agree with you that the priming and obvious coaxing of the participant into thinking the survey was about XYZ are the biggest issue. You mention that the "attitude" oriented questions seem interesting, and they are, but they are also almost all garbage and impossible to interpret. Almost all of them are double (or even more) barreled, asking multiple questions in the same question.

"Political movements designed to advance the interests of particular genders, races, or sexual identities are inherently divisive and discriminatory"

For instance- I may say agree to this statement for gender movements being divisive, but I might not think they are discriminatory. I can simultaneously think the opposite about race movements. It's all in all a crappy question because you have no idea what the respondents are actually responding to. You could assume that they were agreeing with all parts of question but that's a pretty strong assumption to make that probably wouldn't hold across your entire sample.

They also fail to define certain terms, such as what they mean by "left leaning" media sources. Some people think the local communist newsletter is left leaning because they understand what left politics actually look like, while most might think that left leaning is MSNBC or the New York Times or anything that isn't Fox News. They should have given a few sources as an example so that all respondents would be on a similar page. Otherwise it can only be interpreted as the respondents feelings towards whatever they happen to feel are left leaning sources (whatever that may be).

Agreed about the usability of the attitude questions. They are so biased in their construction that it is just really, really hard to see how you can use those answers in any reliable way. And yes gosh there are so many questions that need to be broken up into smaller parts because they are bringing in way too many variables. It is a useless question for the most part.

And I also totally agree about needing to define terms and categories. That's a problem throughout the survey especially since as some have pointed out this was given to an international audience!

Some people think the local communist newsletter is left leaning because they understand what left politics actually look like

I am the guy who brought this survey to the attention of the OP. Yesterday I was dismissed on this sub, for suspecting that someone was trying to argue to me that only communists are "True Left". (Some context: I am a member of the Labour Party in the UK, which
is
on the left, and has banned communist entryists for years.) People told me that it would be bad social science to say that, and no-one on this sub would say that. Today we have someone saying exactly that
on this sub. Guys, I told you so!

Sigh. Yes I'm aware that there are more than just communists on the left, your comment is irrelevant to what was actually being said. It's just a tangential "gotcha" that accomplishes literally nothing.

The only reason I said that was because I was pointing out that the survey's question is flawed because people have radically different understandings of what it means to be left or right wing politically. In some countries "left wing" is closer to a moderate or centric position, while in others it is really, really far left. That is what I was saying. You've kind of made that point all over again for me right here. Thanks.

Anyways I am learning SPSS for my job and figured I'd run a quick crosstab. 85.9% of those surveyed who agreed with the statement "Men, women, and minorities should be held to the same standards" also agreed with the statement "Although it is not an excuse for unequal standards, innate differences between the genders exist and should be discussed.
Table
for those interested.

Just to note, this tab sort of highlights why it's important to spread out your response categories in a likert scale to 5+. The way the questions are written were almost impossible to not at least kind of agree to, resulting in really really homogeneous responses to both questions. You mention the 85.9% stat, which is interesting, but it's also a bit confusing in light of the finding that people 81.5% of the respondents who disagreed about people being held to the same standard agreed that innate differences should be discussed. The cell sizes are really too small to tell a lot of the time, really. The lack of variability across the measure due to the weak question design really makes it hard to conclude much other than "nearly everyone selected agree"

Isn't it also the problem of who is being surveyed? If you have a survey universe where everyone holds the same political ideology and ask them questions about the ideology the results should be skewed no matter what the survey design is. And although "GamerGate" isn't a solid political ideology they have unifying thoughts about gender and minorities that makes them a cohesive group.

You're right, it's both. But in that case you can still spread people's attitudes out further with careful question writing. Making questions more extreme is one trick for this, such as changing the phrasing from "Men, women, and minorities should be held to the same standards" to "Men, women, and minorities should all be held to the same standards at all times." Along with more response categories you'd see more variation in response to a question like that because "strongly agreeing" with the new phrasing is a more radical position compared to the original phrasing. Lots of people would probably still pile in on the extreme category, but as a rule Likert scale questions benefit from strongly worded statements that tend towards the extreme of a particular attitude or position. Otherwise people just agree to everything.

I work at a research center as well. For an introduction I'd recommend Earl Babbie's book "The Basics of Social Research" and Dillman et al's "Internet, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method" for a more thorough discussion of mail and web surveys.

I specialize in web surveys so I don't know too much about phone polling but Babbie would probably be able to point you in the right direction. I know there is a huge lit on the topic.

The entire point of the OP here is that the survey isn't good enough to establish anything regarding the political leanings of GGers, but if we ignore the very serious issues it does have, it could only be used to indicate that GGers are Right Wingers who consider themselves to be Left Wing.

They have mistaken this for an attempt to use the survey to prove that GGers are not left wing. Apparently, "for the sake of argument" doesn't mean anything to them.

Oh, and they are arguing that they can disregard anything posted here because all of the BadX subreddits are actually SRS.

I'm not part of GamerGate or anything (came here from
/r/mistyfront, a content forager sub) and don't follow it much at all. This type of attitude, though, makes me realize how terrible both sides are.

Nice work, OP. As others have mentioned, I took the original article to task on
/r/badpoliticsa few months ago, noting pretty much the same things: that I thought the poll, if anything provided much stronger evidence that Gamergate was predominantly US right-libertarians. I must admit that I had originally assumed that the survey was so poorly constructed that it would have to be mendacious, though your point about priming issues is interesting. I certainly think the choice of questions is very telling. The survey spends very little time on economic questions, and some of the ones it does ask really have nothing to do with being left or right (most people agree that tax avoidance is wrong, for example; its how one thinks taxes should be set up in the first place that's interesting). The 'political issues' section is also very telling, it's almost impossible to believe that these issues (which are for the most part points where a person on the left and an Alex Jones listener might come into grudging agreement) were picked without a great deal of thought.

Nice job! I missed this the first go around. The questions are definitely telling as is the way that the creator analyses the data they collected. I'd love to see a survey that actually gets at political attitudes but I imagine it might be hard to get enough quality responses. In other words I expect if I created a solid survey they'd just troll it.

Ooh, thanks for the link. I just commented elsewhere in the thread that I found the "left-libertarian" being lumped in as "leftist" to be suspect, so it's nice to see some analysis on the subject. I also love that in that thread, you draw the parallels to those terrible polls that are explicitly designed to make everyone out to be a libertarian, because the questions in the survey are absolutely centered around and framed similarly to U.S. libertarian talking points. Good work all around.

So I haven't really followed this whole Gamergate thing (will -gate suffixes ever die?), but it's an instance of a broader phenomenon. It's the "I can't be ___-ist, I'm a liberal!" effect. It doesn't really matter if GG or any other movement or person is left or right or whatever. Even if you're the most hardcore socialist, you can hold reactionary positions on some topic. Proudhon was the first self-declared anarchist, but he was also a huge racist and sexist. The whole "but I'm liberal!" thing is just concern trolling.

Well I know I'm not a sexist because I believe in equality and freedom for everyone. I still disagree with hard line feminist and "sjw" (for lack of a better term) advocates . I'm also socialist. It's impossible to pigeon hole individuals politics. I'm probably far more left than most economically because I believe in everyone having a high quality of life. I will never buy into Gender critiques of art

You know what this dataset needs now? Charts. So many charts. All the charts. And not those namby pamby charts from the editorial, but some true Chart Excellence that can show us the true meaning of GG. Charts with quadrants and relationships to Ghandi vs. Hitler. Incomprehensible charts-on-charts in 3D. Maybe something to do with a horseshoe??

I will not be making these charts. Y'all don't want to know about my sad, sad data vis skills. But someone needs to tackle this.

Nice work. I do despise them because they are incredibly sexist and racist. I've been puzzled by the question of where to place them too-but it is interesting to have some data. I think by the average American standard they would be considered part of the left honestly. I mean the very high number that says it think the income gap is too high makes me doubt they (as a whole) are that radically libertarian or right wing. However, most of the people who post here are in academia, and the bar for what is considered left is considerably different than what the average American would think IMO (please correct me if I'm wrong). For example, many academics I know think Obama is a center/center right neoliberal imperialist. Many people I know (family) who aren't in academia think he's far left or a socialist.

Anyway my hypothesis is that GG is an eclectic mix of some libertarians, some of the radical right (who are obviously trying to recruit) and a lot of what people joke about as brogressives. Basically they are terrible on racial and gender issues- but I bet they are the kind of people who thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but that Hillary is a man hating corporate stooge. Some questions I would have liked to have seen asked are, "would you consider voting for Bernie Sanders?" I have a feeling he would be more popular than someone further right who fights for gender issues like Claire McCaskil. So basically what I'm saying is that I think they (most) are left enough to fall under the extremely broad umbrella of American liberalism, but they are toxically sexist and racist, I think they are extremely bitter about the fact that white men aren't at the center of what is considered the left. But I'm happy to hear other thoughts on the data. I'm not extremely attached to this interpretation, it just reflects what my observation has yielded.

Edit: Looks like they are brigading us. Time to use postmodern language to throw them off.

Plot those out with the y-axis as authoritarian/libertarian and x-axis conservative/liberal you get a political compass!

The point of the post is that this survey is rife with priming issues, scale construction problems and bad social scientific practices. If you want to critique at least don't be a boring troll and actually engage with what it says.

That's even less useful, my views on foreign policy or taxation can be liberal without precluding a more reactionary view on social policies but it would still push me into the left quadrants of the compass.

Seeing as gg primarily focuses on social issues as opposed to foreign policy and economics this can be a real confound on the results and influence any characterization of the group.

EDIT: As an example I took the compass test, answered in a left wing manner regarding foreign policy and economic issues and a more right wing stance with regards to social issues, my final score was left wing, neutral to slightly authoritarian on the libertarian/authoritarian axis,

It is less useful because it is a high level blunt tool for assessing a specific topic of political discourse, see my edit. There are numerous survey scales for social issues as well as tools such as topic modeling and discourse analysis that can offer a more granular approach than the compass.

EDIT: It should also be said, it isn't really a matter of the compass versus self reports, they are both not very good, just for different reasons.

+/- 0.25 on X/Y is about all you can expect, but with a large sample size, in the hundreds, you'll get a rough enough picture of where people sit.

OP picked 7/39 questions to enforce a strange worldview and hilariously says "because they questioned their position they are not liberals", mmm tribalism, how can one be a lib and DARE to question it?

You are kind of missing my point. Why should I care about what gg thinks regarding foreign intervention? Or taxation? Or economic policy? GG as a movement isn't politically active on these fronts and it doesn't factor into how people view GG politically. But the political compass uses these questions to assess an overall position.

The reason OP focused on the questions in the post are because they are related to areas where GG is politically active and are therefore salient and relevant to the discussion of the movement's political orientation. If GG suddenly started working in the foreign policy sphere or tackling issues regarding taxation and state intervention then questions about foreign policy would be relevant. But thus far GG's political expressions are generally focused around social issues, therefore it needs to be assessed on those terms. Otherwise you are making an apples to oranges comparison. In gaming terms it is like saying I love counterstrike because I play a lot of Civ, the two are both games, just as social issues and foreign policy are both politics, but they exist within different realms of behavior under the same banner.

Thank you for confirming the validity of:
"Words like racism, misogyny and homophobia are losing their meaning through increasing misuse"

At this point, you're just using the word 'racist' as 'person I don't like'. Gamergate's "racism" would come as a tremendous surprise to all the people of color supporting this movement, including myself. Or, as you call it, internalized racism. How dare these minorities think for themselves and question SJW orthodoxy and anti-white racism?

How is "Chairman Pao" racist or sexist? I mean, it's misgendering, possibly, but I don't think that's the intent - I think it was just because with "Chairwoman Pao" it's harder to see what the allusion is to, and anyway GGers don't care for words they perceive as "politically-correct" like chairwoman or chairperson.

On a related note, because the videos this sub sometimes links, youtube now keeps recommending me "Sargon of Akkad", no matter how many times I click the "not interested" button. No, I would not like to see an hour long rant about how evil feminists all hate men, please stop existing.

Scott Alexander has a good counter to this argument. He calls your form of argument the motte-and-bailey fallacy. If you genuinely believe what you're saying, it suggests you don't know as much about the spectrum of feminist opinion as GamerGaters do.

Oh I'm glad we have the voice of someone with no experience of knowledge of social science outside of his "I can't be privileged by masculinity if I was bullied in high school" article. Totally valuable, and not responded to in any way by any feminist.

it suggests you don't know as much about the spectrum of feminist opinion as GamerGaters do.

Bwahahahaahahahahahahaha. Oh man. that is fucking rich. That... oh man. I can't even think of a good reply. If I knew as much about feminism as Gamergators I'd think that TERFS and SWERFS were a hearty pub meal.

If I knew as much about feminism as gators, I'd swear that all women were out to get me and my precious videogames in some wide ranging conspiracy between academia and the media industry. I'd see academics discussing artforms and call it "collusion", and I'd shriek and wail at any suggestion that I might be just a little bit insensitive to other people's issues.

But I don't know as much about feminism as gators, in fact, just by having done cursory research and just a few undergrad level gender studies courses I can safely say that I know more than gamer gators about feminism. It's not hard when your opponents demonstrate on a daily basis just how little they know or understand about literally anything outside their little bubble of "gamers are
oppressed".

So there are lots of examples of feminism not just being about fighting discrimination against women. You've given two examples in your comment. I could cite others. Scott Alexander reacts to this by saying "I am not a feminist". I react by saying "I am a realist feminist - I support some but not all causes that go under the banner of feminism."

Why does this matter? It's because it alienates people who could have been allies. But because activist feminists aren't running for election - they use shaming as their primary weapon - they don't see being alienated as their problem but a moral failing on the part of their opponents. For them, it's literally morally wrong to disagree with them.

You correctly identify that there are a number of varying positions held in the feminist community, with different goals and interests. Then you expand and point out that some feminists do indeed disagree with and in some cases discriminate against others, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists being one such group.

Then you completely lose it, claiming that these fringe feminists, who willfully alienate others, are representative of feminists on the whole. Your Alexander quote suggests that no one should identify under the "banner of feminism" because of the existence of alienation within some feminist groups.

So there are lots of examples of feminism not just being about fighting discrimination against women.

That doesn't make feminism any less about discrimination against women. The examples I mentioned are still prime examples of feminists discussing discrimination. TERFs for example still engage in feminist discourse. However, they discriminate against transpeople, characterizing transwomen as "wolves in sheeps clothing" and transmen as cowardly women running from the fight. Discussions within the feminist mainstream about TERFs talk about the discrimination of transpeople within feminism and generally fight to make sure that trans voices are heard and recognized. This demonstrates the ability of feminists to look at themselves and attempt to fight discrimination no matter where it is.

I think in all cases it comes down to disagreements over what constitutes discrimination against women. Which is something no reasonable person could support, right - who would support discrimination against women just for being women?

So when Scott Aaronson was criticised by Amanda Marcotte for (according to her) being a quote unquote "nice guy" and treating women as vending machines for sex, Scott Alexander took one look at that unfounded attack on Scott Aaronson and saw "nerd-shaming". The reality is both sides were probably reading things into the situation that weren't there. Amanda Marcotte thought she saw discrimination, probably reflexively applied the "nice guy" stereotype (irony alert, feminists being prejudiced against men!), and reacted to the imaginary discrimination that she'd manufactured in her head. Scott Alexander saw Amanda Marcotte being, in his eyes, cruel without good reason, and assumed it was "nerd shaming".

Let's take another example. freebsdgirl posted a review of a Vivek Wadhwa book without having read it, accusing him of "profiting" from feminism (which was false, in fact) and "intimidating and silencing" women from his book's twitter account (an example of the "retweeting or linking = intimidation" school of thought in feminism). She evidently thought the ends justify the means (normally reviewing a book without having read it is considered very poor form) and that he was in some sense discriminating against women. Wadhwa disagreed, although as a feminist and ally, he eventually acceded to demands from a handful of vocal feminists that he stop speaking up on behalf of women in tech in the media ever again. This left a bad taste in the mouth of some onlookers, including some of Wadhwa's female supporters.

So sorry, I gave the wrong impression - I did not mean to imply that it was only TERFs who alienate others. It's anti-GG notable freebsdgirl, it's famous noughties feminist Amanda Marcotte (and a sizeable chunk of her commenters)... there are many other examples. And while Wadhwa complied and stayed on-side, though criticising his critics, and Aaronson completely capitulated to his critics on one point of contention - whether "the patriarchy" exists - some other allies and potential allies go "radio silent" or even become MRAs.

Even Wadhwa himself could be said to have alienated people in the tech community with his earlier over-the-top attack on Twitter (check his Wikipedia article). Chickens coming home to roost? I cynically suspect no prominent male ally can escape eventually being torn to pieces by feminists - I am no exception.

Please note, I am not against alienating people per se. I have read that Marcotte has form for alienating Catholics, when she was on the John Edwards campaign, but as an atheist I approve of that (although it was perhaps unwise for a Democratic campaign staffer!). I don't approve of alienating nerds as a group, not because I am a nerd but because it's simply not the case that all shy nerds have nice guy syndrome, or that all guys that think they are nice have nice guy syndrome.

In what way is this an example of a motte-and-bailey doctrine? (not a fallacy!) I suppose you think the motte is the "not being discriminated against" while the bailey is the active discrimination feminists secretly desire?

But as far as I can tell mainstream feminists don't (necessarily) have a motte-and-bailey doctrine. The movement is about fighting discrimination, and they genuinely believe their policies achieve this. Their opponents however think their policies are discriminatory. There is no strong claim hidden behind a modest one, just differing opinions about policy.

If I thought I could get a good chunk of GG to take a survey seriously I could easily get a professor I work with on board, get it through irb pretty quickly, and administer it. I think they'd also like to see a solid survey about their attitudes and beliefs. But I worry they'd just troll it

Why don't you reach out to the mods at KotakuInAction, or even just go there and start a thread asking people if they'd be ok with it. As long as they don't think your trying to screw them over in some way I think they'd love to do it and see the results, especially if you can get some credentials (such as your proffessor friend) behind it.

However bad this survey may have been there is no evidence that it was trolled.

Well this survey was created by a GG supporter so I'm not surprised they didn't troll. But maybe if we offered to put up the results of each question online the way this survey creator did giving everyone access to the results they'd be receptive. I should run it by the Prof first. We also have a political scientist in the division who I'm sure would help craft the survey. And we could do some general personality questions to get at the big five (as imperfect as the big five may be it is the best standard we currently have.)

I think they'd be very receptive to that, From what I've seen they're pretty welcoming to neutral parties.

If you do do this one of the things I would be curious in seeing is whether gamergate supporter are becoming more right wing. I suspect a number of them were liberal before gamergate but that they have moved across the political spectrum due to the events in gamergate. This might explain the any difference between self identification and actual beliefs.

You won't be able to account for the non-trivial potential for dishonesty in how they respond. There is a vested interest in painting a certain picture, and many respondents will answer in a way that will support it. I'm not sure how you could frame questions to get around this weakness.

But anyway I think this is the challenge regarding any outsider. On the one hand, someone could just create a new username and no one would know anything about them but probably be suspicious. Alternatively, I could be upfront about who I am but show that I've gone through IRB, offer to share my data, and try to express that I'm genuinely interested in finding accurate data in the most unbiased way possible. A lot of people would probably mistrust either way. It is tough though because I assume they'd like a more accurate presentation of their demographic than most media. And surveys by outsiders is one of the only ways to do that

I'm hardly a scientist, but I find GG (and internet arseholery overall) fascinating, and I just want to say good job. You also wrote this lucidly enough to be understood by a lay reader like me, so congrats.

This isn't even talking about Gamergate as a collective and movement. What the individual members identify or believe holds very little importance in comparison to what their practices are.

The fact is that Gamergate is a reactionary movement because it has reactionary practices, whatever opinions each member holds or what identification of themselves they make means nothing when it comes to whether or not the movement is reactionary or not. A collective is not just a sum of its parts, and it's also very important to make a distinction between theory and practice.

Which one of these answers are supposed to be 'reactionary'? Just to take three examples:

DOJ statistics demonstrate that there is no 'rape epidemic' on campus, and that girls in college are
less
likely to be raped, which isn't to say that every single rape isn't one too many.

The more you misuse words like 'racism', the more they lose their power. This seems self-evident to me. A lot of bona fide racists now hide behind the false accusations of racism, because people are called 'racist' for criticizing a certain religion, or for correcting a black student's grammar (which actually happened at UCLA).

You seem to assume that supporting men's rights is somehow "reactionary", while being a feminist is not. I'm neither an MRA, nor a feminist, and yet I can see how the mainstream of both groups have a point. Why this disparity though?

In short, there is absolutely nothing 'reactionary' about Gamergate or the people who participate in it. On the contrary, it has been one of the most welcoming communities I've ever been a part of - and a SJW test claims that I am "extremely underprivileged" (which I reject, btw). We've been slandered by radical feminists and identity politics advocates, so it should not be a surprise that we don't think these people have their priorities straight.